Increase your productivity: turn off those RSS

11Nov07

Dan Miller (Macworld) found a sure fire way to increase your productivity: stop watching the news. Particularly, those news feeds. The interweb became an explosion of information and along this explosion, also came innovations in getting information. One of these is RSS. Such a marvel of an idea. Get your daily fix of news and info in one go. You don’t need to waste your time by going to websites every single day to see what’s new and upcoming. Subscribe to a feed and that’s it.

The problem is, it’s too easy to just grab an RSS feed and stick it in your favorite RSS reader (mine is Google reader). in Dan Miller’s case, probably that of millions others, you get too many feeds, too many new stuff, that you are compelled to read all of them. This eventually leads to wasting the time you saved from not having to go to each website one by one. As Miller said, “I’m probably a bit better informed than I used to be. But it also means I haven’t been getting as much actual work done as I could.”

The solution?

Get out of the habit. Turn away from those Readers. And you might be surprised to find out, as Dan Miller did, that the world doesn’t end when you stop reading your feeds.